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July 2nd – You can learn a lot regarding the strength of your opponent’s hand by his sizing on turn – especially after a flop raise

Poker is a game of incomplete information. The best players take the little information that is available to them and accurately decipher what probable hands their opponent holds. There are several techniques that can help you to do this well and one of the most telling ones is through bet sizing. Normally, the bigger the bet the stronger the hand. Now, this is not always the case, especially in the rare instances that you find players who can overbet bluff, but in general, especially on wetish types of boards, players want to “protect” their big hands so that they do not get sucked out on.

In an earlier column I wrote that minish types of raises on wet boards usually represent a top pair type of hand since if your opponent had a bigger hand, like two pair or a set, they would raise more so that you could not catch up. Even though this approach is fundamentally flawed it is one of the most common patterns I see in live poker. Taking this a step further, if we are unsure as to the strength of our opponent’s hand we can actually get even more information by what he follows up with in his bet sizing on the turn. A lot of the time we will not be able to exactly pinpoint his strength by one action but combined with a second we can usually paint an accurate picture of his range.

I’ll give an example of a hand that I played at $10-$20 no-limit at the Commerce casino a few years ago. I was under the gun and had a weak amateur player directly to my left. We had effective stacks of $4,000. Picked up two red queens and raised it to $80. The weak player called, as did another guy on the button. The flop came out pretty well for me J 7 2 and I led out for a $160 continuation bet. The weakish player immediately made it $400. The button then folded and the action was back to me. Unfortunately, because the board was dry and his raise size was neither small nor big I did not know at this point what he had. If the board was say J 7 5 and he had bumped it up to $350 I would lean towards him having a hand like K-J or A-J. But his action left me in the dark. I decided to call and see what he did on the next street. The turn brought the 4, I checked and now he bet $300.

Not only was his sizing relatively small compared to the pot but it was actually less than the flop raise. Anytime you see a player follow up with a bet that is equal to or less than his previous street’s raise than his hand is usually not that strong. I squarely put him on A-J and decided to make an extremely thin check-raise on the turn. I made it $650 and he called. The river was the 5 and I bet $800. My opponent did not take too long and called, tabling A-J.

Some of the other players at the table, including the pros, were stunned at how the hand played out. It is very rare that you would ever see anyone check-raise the turn after being raised on the flop with a lone overpair in a deepstack cash game.
However, I knew through this player’s betting patterns exactly his strength. Instead of checking behind in position on the turn and having to face a big bet on the river, this type of player actually named his price on the turn in an attempt to get a free showdown. It is actually not that bad a play if you are up against non-perceptive opponents. I go into this concept in more detail in episode “Turn Sizing” of my podcast Deuce Plays Premium. Be careful though, even though when your opponent follows up with a small turn bet he is normally not that strong, this does not mean that he will necessarily fold and I would hesitate to try to bluff him.

June 29th – If your value bets are called and you’re good close to all of the time then you are not value betting thinly enough.

There is a simple equation to determine if a value bet on the river is profitable. When your bet is called, if you are good more than 50 percent of the time then we are in the green. This is only the case, though, when we are called. We could be making improper value bets and not know because our opponent folds the river. Value betting in live low stakes no-limit really is where 95 percent of the money is won and lost.

If you want to become a good no-limit player you must constantly “value own” yourself. What this means is that when you are betting for value a fair amount of the time, when you are called you should lose. Why would we ever want to lose? Because if when getting called we are always winning we are leaving tons of value on the table. The best example of this is to look at the typical patterns of your average “showdown monkey.” When this type of player bets for value he always thinks he has what is close to the nuts in his eyes. When he is called he is good almost 100 percent of the time. The times that he is good only 75 or 80 percent of the time he checks his hand back on the river and gets to showdown. Now let us look at a more thinking good player. He tries to get the thinnest value that is possible while still increasing his winrate. When he bets on the river for value he may be good only 60 or 70 percent of the time. His bets are profitable (over 50 percent) but are wrong more often. It is fairly common to see him bet, be called and have a worse hand for value than his opponent. This is the definition of value owning. However, unlike the other player that checks back his strong non-nut hands, he is actually getting value from those hands where he is only good 60 or 70 percent of the time.

A lot of people will counter my argument by saying that they do not value bet that much with medium strength hands in position because they do not want to open the betting back up in big bet poker. This can be a viable concern against aggressive players in a tournament when they know that they can put a lot of pressure on your for your tournament life and the bluffing frequency is higher. However, like I have stated before, in cash games this dynamic just doesn’t exist. Usually when you are value betting you think that your opponent has some sort of worse hand – and most players will not be good enough to turn these worse hands (a hand like second pair or top pair/weak kicker) into bluffs.

One of the ways to improve your game is to start value owning yourself more. This is a technique to help you value bet more often. Remember, so long as you are good more than 50 percent of the time when called, your bet is profitable. You would like to get that number down as close to 50 percent as possible so you should be losing some of these showdowns! If you are always winning when you value bet, you are playing too much like Mr. Showdown Monkey. ♠

Want Card Player and Bart to provide analysis on a cash game hand you played? Send full hand details (blinds, stacks, street-by-street action) to @CardPlayerMedia. If we choose your hand, we’ll send you a Card Player subscription.

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “Deuce Plays” on DeucesCracked.com and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LivettheBike.com